by John Jakes
“Your answer, James?”
“I’m—inclined to join. But I must think a while before the decision can be final.”
“Certainly. Not too long, though,” Powell murmured. “Preparations are already going forward.”
He shook the reins again; the clip-clop quickened. The breeze lifted Powell’s hair and refreshed his face as he swung the gig back toward the city. He was smiling. The fish was securely on the hook.
When Lafayette Baker dismissed him, Elkanah Bent’s tenuous self-control broke like a dry twig. He rode straight for the residence of Jasper Dills, passing the Star office en route. Swarming crowds read bulletins by torchlight. The armies had engaged or were about to engage near some obscure market town in Pennsylvania.
As he had once done at Starkwether’s, Bent pounded the door of the Dills’s house. Beat on it until his fist ached and an austere servant answered. “Mr. Dills is out of the city for several days.”
“Coward,” Bent muttered as the door slammed. Like so many others, the lawyer had fled at the first threat of invasion.
With his sole source of help unavailable, he knew he dared not stay in Washington. An unexpected option suddenly presented itself. Why stay in the North at all? He hated its army for failing to recognize his military talent, thus denying him the career he deserved. He hated its President for favoring the Negroes. Most of all, he hated its government for using him when it was expedient and casting him aside when it was not.
In his rooms, snuffling and cursing those who had conspired against him, he rummaged through a trunk to find the pass he had saved from the Richmond mission. Wrinkled and soiled, it was still too legible to serve his purpose. A sentry would have to be blind not to detect forgery of a new date—which he had neither the materials nor the skills to accomplish anyway.
Use the bureau’s regular sources, then? No. Baker might hear of it and guess his destination. He must cross the Potomac without papers, without using any of the bridges. There were ways. The bureau had taught him a lot in a short time.
His damp hair clinging to his forehead and his shirttails flying out of his trousers, he flung clothing and a few possessions into a portmanteau and a small trunk. The last item he packed was the painting from New Orleans. As he worked, the pressure of hatred built again.
He swung to stare at his reflection in the old, speckled pier glass. How ugly he was; gross with fat. With a cry, he seized the china water pitcher and crashed it into the mirror, breaking both.
Moments later, the landlady was pounding on the door. “Mr. Dayton, what are you doing?”
In order to leave, he had to unlock the door and shove the old woman aside. She fell. He paid no attention. Down the stairs he went, trunk on his shoulder, portmanteau in his other hand while the woman bleated about rent in arrears. A sleepy boarder in a nightcap peered at him as he went out.
In the sultry dawn, he rattled south in a hired buggy. Some blustering and a flash of his little silver badge took him through the fortification lines. He went straight on along the roads of Prince Georges and Charles counties toward Port Tobacco, where certain watermen were known to be loyal to the Confederacy provided the loyalty was secured with cash.
Bent scarcely saw the countryside through which the buggy carried him. His mind picked over the decision to which he had been driven, constructing additional justifications for it. Perhaps the Southern leaders weren’t as bad as he had always believed. They hated the darkies as much as he did, which was in their favor. And during his time in Richmond, he had found that he could blend in without causing suspicion. There had to be a place for him in the Confederacy; there was none in the North any longer.
He was still realistic enough to acknowledge some facts about his defection. The established government—more specifically, the army—probably wouldn’t employ him. Put it another way: He did not want to ask them for employment. Though he was by no means the first person to change sides in this war, they would still distrust him, hence put him in a menial post if they put him in any at all. Second, he dared not say who he really was or reveal much about his past. To do so would lead to questions, requests for explanations.
He would find some other way to survive. One occurred to him as the morning grew hotter and the road dust thicker. Baker had mentioned a man said to be conspiring to establish a second Confederacy. What was his name? After some minutes, it came to him: Lamar Powell. As Baker said, it was probably just a tissue of rumors. But a question or two wouldn’t hurt.
In the drowsy town of Port Tobacco, an old waterman with half his face stiffened from a paralytic seizure said to Bent, “Yes, I can smuggle you over to Virginny for that sum. When will you be comin’ back?”
“Never, I hope.”
“Then let me buy you a glass to celebrate,” the old man said with half a grin. “We’ll make the run as soon as the sun’s down.”
85
“AFTER THEM,” CHARLES YELLED, and spurred Sport down the country lane. Shotgun in his left hand, he closed on the quartet of alarmed Yankees who had ridden out of a grove half a mile distant. “We want to catch one,” Charles shouted to his companion, two lengths behind. He was a new-issue replacement, a farmer boy of eighteen who weighed around two hundred and thirty pounds. He was a cheerful, biddable young man with two simple ambitions: “I want to love a lot of Southern girls an’ bust a bunch of Yankee heads.”
Jim Pickles was his name. He had been posted to the scouts because he was deemed too bulky and inelegant for regular duty. He would probably be on the dead line most of the time, having broken the backs of his mounts because of his weight. He had been sticking close to the senior scout—who insisted on being called Charlie, not Major Main—ever since Stuart and his men began their ride northward out of Virginia and away from the main body of the army, which Longstreet was leading into enemy country.
Three brigades—Hampton’s, Fitz Lee’s, and that of the wounded Rooney Lee under the command of Colonel Chambers—had crossed the Potomac on the night of June 27. Their route took them almost due north, east of the mountain ranges, under rather vague orders from General Lee. They could, at General Stuart’s discretion, pass around the Union army, wherever it might be, collecting information and provisions en route. They had gotten some of the latter already, together with one hundred and twenty-five captured wagons. But of the former they had gotten almost none. They pressed on without knowing the whereabouts of the main Union force.
Charles heard gripes about that, muttered statements that General Jeb was keen to pull off another spectacular stunt—something similar to the ride around McClellan on the peninsula that had brought him fame and turned out crowds to strew flowers before his troops of horse as they rode back into Richmond. Stuart’s reputation had been tarnished at Brandy Station when he kept his men so busy with reviews that they failed to detect the Union reconnaissance in force. Maybe he thought a second dash around the Union army would remove the tarnish.
They rode into Pennsylvania on the thirtieth of June. Hunting for Lee, they found the Yanks at Hanover, and after a sharp little fight, read local newspapers for their first solid information about the invasion of the state by Lee and Longstreet.
Familiar history began to repeat. Short rations. Scant sleep or none. Forced marches, with men dozing in the saddle or falling out. And for Charles, contradictory thoughts of Gus. A longing to see her, and doubts about the wisdom of it.
They went on to Dover and Carlisle and then another twenty-odd miles overnight toward Gettysburg, where the army had more or less blundered into an unwanted engagement on ground not of its choosing. It was said this happened because Stuart was off gallivanting—following his vague orders—and was thus unable to provide Lee with accurate reports of the enemy’s whereabouts.
Now it was the second of July. About five miles south of the spot where Charles and Jim Pickles had come upon the four Yankees, smoke drifted and cannon roared. Behind the grove from which the blue-clad troopers emerged, there arose a du
st cloud of some size. Charles interpreted it as a large body of horsemen on the move—toward Hunterstown, he guessed, after examining a crude map. He wanted to know exactly who was responsible for that dust. He was sure General Hampton would want to know, too. Hence his wish to capture a Yank.
Galloping down on the surprised foursome, he felt his exhaustion slough away. He hadn’t slept at all last night, and there had been plenty of excitement while the cavalry rested that morning. General Hampton, riding out alone to survey the terrain, had unexpectedly come upon a soldier from the Sixth Michigan. The enlisted man’s carbine had misfired, and, like a gallant Southern duelist, Hampton had allowed him time to reload. While he did, a second Yankee, a lieutenant, approached sneakily from behind. He sabered Hampton on top of the head. Then the enlisted man fired and nicked him. Gallantry wasn’t a very useful trait any more.
Even with his hat and thick hair to protect him, the general took a four-inch cut in his scalp and barely escaped. The cut was dressed and so was the light chest graze from the enlisted man’s bullet. By noon, he was fully active again, wanting to know, as Stuart did, what was happening north of the main battle site.
So Charles had ridden out with Pickles, and though many times in recent days he had felt he couldn’t travel one more mile without falling over, he had gone that mile and many more—and now he was wide awake, tense, and eager to catch one of the bluebellies.
The Yanks milled at the roadside for a minute, then began to snap off carbine shots. Charles heard a buzz to his left in the rows of tasseled corn. He opened his mouth and gave the Yanks one of those wailing yells that scared hell out of them. His beard flew over his left shoulder, spikes of white showing in. it now. So many layers of dirt and dried sweat covered him he felt like a mud man.
Pickles closed up behind him, his weight bringing lather to his roan’s flanks. Charles kept going at the gallop, howling. A bullet snapped his hat brim, and then the Yanks started a countercharge with revolvers and drawn sabers.
“Now,” Charles shouted when the range was right. He brought up his shotgun, fired both barrels, and veered Sport to the shoulder, slowing a little. In the clear, Pickles fired. Between them they downed two of the Yanks. The other two reined up, wheeled about, and galloped into the safety of the grove.
“I hope one’s still alive,” Charles yelled as he rode on. The horse of one of the fallen men was trotting away, but the second animal nuzzled its rider where he lay in the road. The trooper didn’t move. Disgusted, Charles slowed down to a walk.
Soon he could see the flies gathering around the open mouth of the trooper in the road. No information to be gotten there. The other Yank was nowhere in sight.
Charles heard thrashing in some high weeds to his left, then a groan. With an eye on the dust clouds billowing perhaps two miles to the northwest, he dismounted and cautiously advanced to the roadside. Sweat dropped from the end of his nose as he craned over and saw the Union cavalryman, a bearded fellow with his revolver still in its holster, sitting in the bottom of the ditch. Blood soaked his left thigh.
Watching the man, Charles laid his shotgun on the ground with his left hand while drawing his Colt with his right. He cocked the revolver. Wary and scared, the Yank breathed loudly as Charles clambered down to him. Pickles sat watching, an eager pupil.
“What unit are you?”
“General—Kilpatrick’s—Third Division.”
“Bound where?”
The Yank hesitated. Charles pressed the muzzle of his gun to the perspiring forehead. “Bound where?”
“Lee’s left flank—wherever that is.”
Quickly, Charles stood and scanned the hazy treetops bending in the hot wind. Reverberations of cannon fire continued to roll out of the south. With another glance at the wounded man, Charles began to back up the side of the ditch. As he leaned down for his shotgun, his eyes left the Yank for a second. Jim Pickles cried, “Hey, Charlie, watch—”
Pivoting, he sensed rather than saw the downward movement of the Yank’s hand. He fired. The bullet jerked the man sideways. Charles blew into the barrel of his Colt, noting that the Yank had been reaching for his wounded thigh with his left hand, not for his holster with his right.
“All right, Jim. Let’s get the word back to Hampton. That dust is Kilpatrick, trying a flanking movement.”
As they turned about and started east on the deserted road, Pickles broke into a huge grin. “Lord God, Charlie, you’re somethin’. Cool as a block from the icehouse. ’Course, I feel kinda sorry for that Yank. He was only reachin’ down because he was hurtin’.”
“Sometimes your hand has to move faster than your brain,” Charles answered with a shrug. “If I’d waited, he might have pulled the pistol. Better a mistake than a grave.”
The younger man chuckled. “Ain’t you somethin’. You boys in the scouts, you’re regular killin’ machines.”
“That’s the general idea. Every dead man on their side means fewer on ours.”
Jim Pickles shivered, not entirely in admiration. To the south, the guns at Gettysburg kept roaring.
Pitch black ahead, pitch black behind. Rain rivered from Charles’s hat. It had soaked through his cape hours ago.
In many respects it was the worst night he had ever spent as a soldier. They were bound south to the Potomac, in retreat, a train of confiscated farm wagons, most springless, each hung with a pale lantern. The procession stretched out for miles.
Hampton’s men had drawn the honored position of rear guard. To Charles it was more like duty on the perimeter of hell. Full of irony, too. The day now passing into its last hours was July fourth.
Yesterday Hampton had taken a third wound, a shrapnel fragment, in a hot fight with Michigan and Pennsylvania horse, part of a failed effort to sweep around and attack Meade’s rear. In some quarters Stuart was being blamed openly for the Gettysburg debacle. Critics continued to say his long ride away from Lee had deprived the army of its eyes and ears.
The Second South Carolina was down to around a hundred effectives. Visiting with his old outfit for an hour, Charles had heard that Calbraith Butler, invalided home after Brandy Station, would spend the rest of his life with a cork foot. The memory stuck with him tonight, and added to it were the outcries of the hurt and maimed packed like fish into the springless wagons whose every roll and lurch increased their pain. The voices filled the rainy dark.
“Let me die. Let me die.”
“Jesus Christ, put me out of this wagon. Have mercy. Kill me.”
“Please, won’t someone come? Take my wife’s name and write her?”
That came from the wagon nearest Charles. Feeling Sport stagger and slip in the mud, he tried to shut his mind to the noise. But it went on: the hiss of rain; the squeal of axles; the men crying out like children. It broke his heart to listen to them.
Jim Pickles rode up beside him. “We’re stopped. Somebody’s mired up the line, I s’pect.”
“Won’t someone come? I can’t make it. I need to tell Mary—”
Bursting with rage, wanting to pull his Colt and blow out the screamer’s brains, Charles whipped his right leg over the saddle. He jumped down, splashing deep in mud. He slapped Sport’s reins into Pickles’s palm.
“Hold him.”
He climbed the rear wheel of the ambulance wagon and fought his way under the canvas into the slithering stir and stink. He thought of Christmas in ’61. Snowing then. Raining now. But the same work to be done.
He was sick in his soul. Sick of the madness and folly of killing men on the other side to save some of his own. Why had they said not one damn word about this kind of thing back at the Academy?
Hands plucked his trousers, the shy, soft touches of frightened children. The rain beat hard on the hooped canvas top. He raised his voice in order to be heard, yet sounded quite gentle.
“Where’s the man who needs to write his wife? If he will identify himself, I’ll help.”
From the parlor window, Orry gazed along Marshall at
the rooftops and row houses reddened by the cloudless sunset. An abnormal silence had enveloped the city for several days, for reasons the general populace did not as yet understand. But he did.
“Some of the fools in the department are trying to say Lee was successful—that he did what he set out to do: reprovision the army off the enemy’s land.” Serious and silent, wearing gray, Madeline sat waiting till he continued. “The truth is, Lee’s in retreat. His casualties may have run as high as thirty percent.”
“Dear God,” she whispered. “When will that be known?”
“You mean when will the papers get hold of it? A day or two, I suppose.” He rubbed his temple, aching suddenly in the broiling heat. “They say Pickett charged the Union positions on Cemetery Hill in broad daylight. With no cover. His men went down like scythed wheat. Poor George—Why did we begin this damned business?”
She went to him, slipped her arms around him, pressed her cheek against his shoulder, wishing she could provide an answer. They held each other in the red light deepening to dark.
In a squalid taproom down by the river basin, Elkanah Bent ordered a mug of beer, which turned out to be warm and flat. Disgusted, he set it down as a white-haired man ran in, tears on his cheeks.
“Pemberton gave up. On the fourth of July. The Enquirer just printed an extra. Grant starved him out. The Yanks have got Vicksburg and mebbe the whole goddamn river. We can’t even hold our own goddamn territory.”
Bent added his sympathetic curse to those of others at the mahogany bar. In the distance, church bells began to toll. Had he slipped into Richmond just when everything was falling apart? All the more reason to locate that fellow Powell.
Mr. Jasper Dills suffered a headache even worse than Orry Main’s. The headache started on Independence Day, a Saturday, when word reached the city of a stunning success at Gettysburg. Washington had been waiting for good news for days. Its arrival put some heart into the holiday celebration.